Today’s show features Ed Rush, speaker, author, advisor, and pilot. Ed Rush is a speaker, a 5-time #1 best selling author, and a successful business consultant. He is a decorated Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot. At the height of his career, he was the #1 instructor in the Marine Corps for 1-against-1 dogfighting and was instrumental in the training development for the new F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. Ed has flown close to 2,000 tactical aircraft hours, with over 50 missions in combat for which he was awarded an Air Medal.
The lessons Ed learned in the cockpit are instrumental and provide the content basis for much of his consulting and speaking. He is now in demand as a popular author, speaker, and business consultant.
Full transcript:
Ray: Hello everyone, this is Ray Hilbert and welcome back to another episode of Bottom Line Faith. I am in beautiful San Diego, California, and I am really fired up to welcome to the show my guest for today, Ed Rush. Ed is a five time number one bestselling author. He speaks to hundreds and hundreds of companies across the planet, actually. He is an executive and business coach to CEOs and top, high-capacity performers and also he’s a brand new dad. We’re sitting across the table from one another. Ed, welcome to Bottom Line Faith.
Ed: Ray, it’s good to be here. Yeah, we have something in common. We were both up late all night last night for different reasons. We just had our fourth child here in San Diego, so that was a very interesting time. So I haven’t slept much, but I’m glad to be here.
Ray: Well me neither. So this will be fun to see how this whole conversation turns out, but, and really and truly thank you for joining the program here. And I left a big part of your bio out and it’s really where so much of your leadership and so much of your expertise in what you’ve written and how you coach, but you had a very, very unique part of your background. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Ed: Yeah, so I was a fighter pilot as you mentioned, and flew F18s in the Marine Corps. I started that just after I left college and, just an amazing time by the way. So I went to combat twice in Iraq. I was in overseas, in Japan and the training of the Marine Corps and just the ability to spend time on combat and overseas with the Marines and sailors that I was working with was amazing. So I did that for 11 years until I got out in 2006. Basically to spend more time with my family and to grow my businesses. But you know, I’ll take you back into the cockpit of the F18 and just kind of share with you a philosophy that I’ve taken with me ever since then. You know, when I showed up at my first squadron, when you, you know, when you do your training, you’re flying these propeller airplanes, then you start flying jets, then you fly some more advanced jets and finally you show up to fly your airplane.
And it was actually three different airplanes. I flew in training before I got to the F18. And so I flew the T34, which is a propeller driven plane, a T2, which is a small light jet. And then the a 4 which actually a former combat airplane. And then, and then I finally got into the F18 team. So when I should have been my first squadron in the F18, I had actually passed through about four different stages moving into that spot where to get to the next layer, you had to be the best. You had to be at the top of your class. So you had to be at the top of your class in boot camp, you had to be at the top of your class in instrument training, and you had to be at the top of your class in primary flight school, then intermediate flight school, then advanced flight school.
And you get to a point where, and I failed kindergarten by the way, which you should know. So I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’ve always really just relied on looking at successful people and mirroring and modeling what they did. So I get in the airplane and I’m thinking that I’m a pretty good pilot and I show up at my first squadron and we do a lot of aerial combat, one against one dog fighting. And that’s really where you get tested to see how good of a pilot you are. There’s a lot of other things we do in the F18, dropping bombs, shooting missiles, but the one against one is really where you can tell someone’s instincts. How good they are at what they do. And I was getting beat bad over and over and over and over again.
It was embarrassing actually, because, you know, you start up, start off every engagement kind of pointing at each other to be completely neutral. And I’d end every engagement by looking over my shoulder to the airplane behind me, shooting me. And so I had, I really thought that I’d gotten to the point where, you know, you feel sometimes where you’re the best of the best of the best. And then finally you show up with these guys who are amazing. I mean, they’re amazing. And I thought that I had maybe accelerated past the point at which I was capable, actually. And so I did something that would change my career for the better and in fact, what changed my life for the better. And what I did was, you know, the simulators that we had were open all week. And so from about eight in the morning until about eight at night, the simulators were always open, but guys are always in there, scheduling time in those simulators because everyone wanted to learn how to get better. But on Friday night, around five, every fighter pilot on the base typically would migrate over to the Oak Club where guys would pretty much drink for the rest of the night. And by the way, I’d make it there eventually, but from five to eight on Friday night, that simulator room was empty. And I would go into that room and I’d sit in the cockpit and I would cover my eyes and I would memorize, just by feel where every single switch was in the airplane. And then I would fly some missions out in that simulator all by myself and just training against simulated airplanes.
And I would drill it and I would do it over and over and over again. And then I would take the procedures manual and I would learn the exact turn rate in every configuration that got me the best turn. And when I realized was, you know, the F18 turns at about 60 to 70 degrees per second at a maximum rate turn. What that means is within three seconds you can do a full hundred, 180 degree turn. That’s the difference between losing and winning. It’s facing someone or being behind someone is 180 degree turn. So I knew if I could make one decision three seconds faster than my opponent, I’d win every time. Well, rarely do you ever get to do that because guys are making decisions in split seconds. So then I realized if I can make three decisions one second faster and when or if I made six decisions a half a second faster, I would win.
And I went within a year and a half from being the worst dog fighter in my squadron to being one of the best. And then within three years I was number one instructor in the entire Marine Corps for one against one dog fighting. So I went from being just awful to being the top of my game, one of the best pilots in the entire Marine Corps, not because of a necessarily skillset but simply because of small incremental changes and understanding that the game of dog fighting and the game of life isn’t a big bold maneuver. Like if you remember in the movie top gun when Maverick had his, you know, put on the brakes, you fly by. Sometimes in life, in business we feel like, gosh, if I could just find like the one thing, the Holy Grail of the magic move, it would make all the difference. Really, a lot of times it comes down to incremental small decisions that you make consistently over time and, and throwing in it a burst every once in a while. And next thing you know you’re successful.
Ray: That’s an incredible story. And so let me ask you this. Was that discipline or that process that you just walked through, was that something that you just kind of like found inspiration from the inside or were you being externally motivated? Look if you don’t get this straightened up, you’re not going to be out in combat, you’re not going to be our guy. What was that like?
Ed: There wasn’t anybody telling me that. I just knew that I wasn’t performing. And at that point in your life, man, if you’ve gotten to the point where you’re flying and you have to have your own internal motivation. And frankly, some of it was just embarrassment. Like, you know, I just didn’t want to lose anymore. And it’s just hard after a while, you know, when you’re that unsuccessful, you know? And interestingly, like that pattern has just been completely across my life. Everything I’ve ever done I was awful at at first, I had never, I’ve known natural giftings but always found a way to find like the few things that you can do to just sort of accelerate success, grab ahold of one thing and then just simply multiply that. And next thing you know, you know, success comes in a whole bunch of different ways.
Ray: And as the old saying goes, everything is hard until it’s easy. Right?
Ed: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s, it really is an interesting principle because I teach a lot of business owners and in the world that I live in where I know and work with a lot of people who teach business principles. And the fact is most of the events that you go to, most of the books that you read, and most of the people that you will follow tend to make things sound like it, oh, it’s so super easy. You know, all you need to do is do this and this and next thing you know. But then good folks like us get into business, we try to start executing these strategies and we get frustrated because it doesn’t sound as easy as the person just mentioned. It’s not as easy as the person just mentioned, but there are easier ways to do things. Don’t get me wrong about that, but it’s never as easy as someone mentioned. But when you put a little discipline in place and when you put some short burst of energy in place going for one thing, what you start to see is it affects everything and makes incredible change.
Ray: I want to come back and just a couple of moments about some of the principles and the way you coach and some of those things that you really, you know, focus on in your business and in consulting practice. But let’s talk a little bit about your faith, your background. How did you come to Christ and what’s that relationship like for you? How did that happen?
Ed: Yeah, so the story actually, my dad was a referee in the NBA with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and he had a few trips to Seattle and in Seattle on the court, there’s a PA announcer for 30, 40 years ago named George Tolls. And George was sitting on the court. My dad and George occasionally would just have dinner as friends and they would just catch up and George began to share the gospel with my dad and my dad was receptive to just listening to it and hearing it and he was coming into Seattle and he was going to meet later that night with George. And George, by the way, who’s become an incredible friend of mine, just amazing man. George called another friend of his named Norm Evans, and Norm ran a ministry called Pro Athletes Outreach. At the time, it was one of the biggest ministries for professional folks like my dad and George called Norm and said, Hey Norm, I need you to come tonight, a meeting with Ed Rush in the locker room after the game and I’m going to share Christ with him.
They go into the locker room, next thing you know, my dad becomes a believer and and within days he’s home telling me this story and I become, I was about eight or nine years old. So yeah. So that was, that was my whole conversion experience right there. But you know, my faith has just grown ever since then. You know, it’s been, it was a long time ago.
Ray: That’s fantastic. And so then, now let me fast forward and now let’s jump back into your fighter pilot training. How did that, those two worlds connect your faith and military or what, you know, just walk me through.
Ed: That’s a great question because you know, in the modern day Christian world, we have a very separated view on almost everything. So, you know, work is work, and family is family, and then church is church.
And the truth is, and I don’t mean to wreck on the modern church, but the modern church almost in a lot of ways facilitates that. There’s not a lot of cross cultural work that goes. One of the reasons I love what you do with Truth At Work is because it really brings together faith and work in an actual, real way that actually works. Remember, go back to that initial story about flying the F18 and I’m interested in fundamentally and things that work on planet earth. I’m not interested in theory or fluff or someone’s idea on something. How I want to actually see it work on planet earth in real life because a lot of ways people view their faith and their work and their mission and everything as sort of separate compartments, especially men. It tends to be very confusing for us and I’ve always been interested in things that work.
And so when I went to bootcamp, before I ever got into F18, and three years before that, when I went to bootcamp, I brought a bunch of three by five cards with me as about 20 cards that I had written verses on. And I carried these little verses in my pocket because I was sure at the time that of the 192,000 people who were in the Marine Corps at that time, I was the only believer. I was convinced of that, that I was joining this organization, that I was the only person of faith there. So I show up at bootcamp and if you’ve ever seen full metal jacket or you’ve heard of Marine Corps bootcamp, you know that it’s a harrowing experience. So you’re getting yelled at, stuff’s flying all over the place. You know, life is just a gigantic blur. You never get any sleep, kind of like now.
And there’s no mercy, there’s no compassion. And all of a sudden on the second night at boot camp, my drill instructor, who I’m pretty sure is the most evil man on planet earth. We’re all, we’re all lying in our racks. It’s 10 or 11 at night. We’re getting ready to go to sleep, which nobody ever did. My drill instructors walking through our squadron and he goes, now he goes, if someone wants to, it would be okay just before I turn off the lights. If somebody wanted to lead our platoon in prayer. He starts it like that. He goes to, if somebody wants to, it would be fun and we caught ourselves candidates at the time, so I was candidate rush and this is exactly how he said it. He goes, if someone wants to lead us in prayer, it would be fine. If somebody would want to do that, can Ed Rush?
Why don’t you go ahead and do that? That’s it. Came out right after it. Now he had never seen, my cards never know I was a believer. There wasn’t the internet at the time, so it wasn’t like he could do any research on me or anything like that. He literally just, and now all of a sudden on day two of bootcamp moment where every single night for 10 straight weeks I get to pray with and for my entire platoon. It was amazing. And it turns out this guy was a believer, I found out later. But then I’d used to take my cards and I used to take my cards and read it. I read a verse to all my guys in my platoon and then I’d pray and then we’d all go to sleep or do whatever we need to do. It was a lesson for me right there that God was just saying, you know, you’re not alone here.
Like, you know, you’re not the only one. There’s other people that I place in this. And so my life as a Marine, my life is a fighter pilot. My life as a believer all moved into each other and they weren’t so separated. So I used to lead Bible studies and help guys be better pilots, you know, be better husbands and dads. And I mean it all mixed in together and that’s the way I’ve always been ever since then.
Ray: Well, I’d like to thank you for sharing that. That’s really pretty cool to hear and how God had that all set up, right. And I think that’s maybe even a great segue because you know, I’ve never been in the military, so first of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart for serving. So, but in the military, as I would understand it, it’s not about political party, it’s not about what’s different. It’s about what we have in common. It’s about a mission, it’s about accomplishing something. And I think as I’ve just gotten to know you, that that’s really a driving force for you. You see some things in our country, you see some things in their world that you’re very passionate about. Would you just speak to kind of like what God is calling you now? We’ll get to more of the coaching and the business side in a moment. But you’ve got a real personal passion here that I think our audience should hear about.
Ed: Yeah. I don’t think there’s anyone that you meet in the United States right now that doesn’t feel like we haven’t lost our way. I mean, as a country, we’ve been called to do some amazing things. We’re set on the global stage with just incredible power and authority, and we’re not heading in a direction that we need to be. And by the way, I’m not talking about right now, and I’m not talking about our president. This has been happening for 40 years or 150 years probably. And so I’ll take it back to the Marines. So, you know, when I was in the Marine Corps, I was convinced that every person in the Navy was a lazy, no good, you know, you can fill in the blanks. And I was convinced that the army had no idea how to fight a war. And I was convinced that the air force was just confused as to what war even was. You know, because we were kind of trained to sort of like disparage the other services and we, we’d fight each other at the bar on Friday night and make fun of each other when we were in classes together.
But let me tell you something. In 2003 we went to war, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force with a coalition of other services, by the way, who were, we were making fun of as well, the Brits and the Canadians and the Australians. But let me tell you the moment we crossed that line, we stopped making jokes towards each other and I actually realized that the Navy, they were, wow. They were really good at what they did, and the Air Force. My goodness. Incredible. The kind of work that they did over Baghdad and the Marines and the Army. I mean, the work that the soldiers did. And so what ended up happening is when we had a common enemy, we came together, we forgot all the little petty disagreements, and we fought our mission with incredible speed and success.
I mean it. What we did there has never been seen on the battlefield for thousands of years, so I learned a lot in that time that you know your enemies really aren’t the enemies that you think they are. And so I began to look at our nation because of a passion for our country. I just feel a feel, a calling, sense of calling, but a passion for our country, which I believe God has his eye on for good. I believe there’s so many things about our country that are such a blessing to the rest of the world, and I believe that we’ve lost our way. Part of the reason we’ve lost our way is because we believe this lie that we’re divided. The story that you see from the mainstream media and every article that you’ll read on any, I don’t care what news outlet it is, I don’t care what side they’re on will tell you the story about how divided our country country is. But if you just take a step back and look at it, you’ll see that it’s not the case. For example, when two airplanes hit the twin towers as a country, it didn’t matter if you were a Democrat or Republican Libertarian. Now we all mourn together. You know, we salute our national heroes. We mourn together and we have this incredible country that really believes in incredible things. But we also have a group of people who are trying to divide us. And there’s a reason for that. CNN was almost bankrupt and out of business until 2015 and now they’re one of the most successful media companies on planet earth because division makes you money. Political parties can’t raise money unless there’s anger or division right now. And so the fastest way that you can do that is to vilify the other side and to make them look as evil as possible because the money begins to flow that way.
And I believe that our country is better than that. The fact is, I don’t think anger and division and frustration and malice and all the kind of things that are happening right now are American. I think it’s quite the opposite. It’s what looks like something that happens in some other countries that have Wars every two years over who’s going to be president. Right? And so I think we have a future and I think our future is a peaceful future, but I think it’s time, frankly, for men of God, women of God to step into the places that they’ve been called to be. And I believe that for far too long believers, good believers have been departing that place. I’ll tell you that when I walk into church and I tell people, people go, well, what’s your mission? I go, Oh, I want to change the country.
And they’re like, how are you going to do that? I eventually plan on running for office. Eventually I’m gonna run for office, you know, Senator, President or something like that. And I’m telling you to a person, this is what they tell me. I don’t care who it is. When I’m talking to somebody in church, they will all look at me and they’ll say the same thing. They’ll go, man, I would never want that for my family. That’s what they, it’s the same thing. It’s almost like, it’s almost like they are handed that cue card cause it’s this the same way. They say it the same way. And I go, man, if the whole country of men and women are going, I wouldn’t want that for my family. Well, no wonder we’ve got all these folks leading us right now because all the people that God called and empowered and gifted to be in places of leadership right now are off, you know, parking cars in the church parking lot.
And so, you know, we’ve got believers who are supposed to be Senators in the United States Senate right now who are parking cars in the parking lot. We’ve got Senators who should probably be parking cars instead of doing what they’re doing. You know? So yeah, I believe that God is calling a new generation of leaders right now, four or 500, I don’t know how many, a lot to come in and create a new revolution in the United States of America and change things for the better.
Ray: All right. That’s fantastic. And so if someone’s listening to the program right now and they’re just encouraged about what they’re hearing, they’re inspired, they want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Ed: Thank you for asking that. So, I’ll give you two quick websites. The first one, I wrote a book last year. It was called the 21 Day Miracle: How to Change Anything in Three Short Weeks. You can go directly there. The website is www.edrushbook.com which is the second most easy website to remember on planet earth. My own website, edrush.com which is the single most easy website to remember on planet earth. So it’s edrush or edrushbook.com. You can learn about me and I’d love to connect with your listeners. I obviously have a passion for your mission, which means I have a passion for the mission of people who are listening to this podcast.
Ray: That’s right. That’s right. Thank you. So let’s talk a little bit about maybe some of the principles. Let’s talk about, you know, you’ve talked so far about the power of incremental changes and commitment and discipline and those sorts of things, and then a united mission, a united cause, which we’ve talked about. You do something that I really want to hear more about. It’s called the ultimate breakthrough. Would you tell us a little bit about that? I’m very intrigued with this.
Ed: Twice a year I do an event, Oh, all across the country called the Ultimate Breakthrough. I’ll give you a little bit of a background on this event and why I do what I do. I mentioned this earlier on, but a lot of times guys see business and spiritual world kind of this a separated morph. And I’ve realized that these things come together seamlessly in a way that exactly how God intended it, frankly. So it was about four years ago and I was leading a business mastermind group and there’s about 15, 16 folks there who were all business leaders. They own their own companies, entrepreneurs and business owners, businesses ranging from folks who are in transition all the way to maybe seven, $10 million businesses.
And we’re in this group and we’re going around at each person as a business owner is getting their own hot seat, where they’re getting helped by the other members of the group on their business. And as we’re going around, we hit this woman named Irene who has this incredibly large company, a seven figure company in Japan. And as we get to her, God just speaks to me and says, you know, you’re going to pray for her today. And I said, no, I don’t. I don’t think I’m going to be doing that today. And God said, no, no, you’re going to pray for her. And I said, I don’t think so. You see God, this is a business group. You know, and by the way, there maybe two or three believers out of the 15 or 16 people. So I say, God, look, I don’t know if you understand this. This is a business group. You see, I mean, these people paid a lot of money. They paid, it was a five figure joined to be in the script. I said, they paid a lot of money. They’re here to talk about business things. They’re not here for prayer or for this weird thing. And God said, well, you know, you should probably still pray. Now what you don’t know about the story is that interesting because I had, it took about 20 minutes of conversation in my head and I ended up praying for her by the way, and I prayed for only probably just to get rid of that conversation in my head. But the part of the story I haven’t told you is this woman Irene at this point has stage four cancer. Now that cancer had moved into her bones. She had lost all of her hair, very bright and very motivated person, but she was dying and God said, I want you to pray for her.
And after this 20 minute argument I said, you know what? We’re going to do it. And so I looked at Irene and I said, Irene, I’m going to ask your permission to do something we have never done before in this group, but I just feel like as a group it would be great if we could just pray for you. And ask God to bless you, especially with your health challenge. And she looked up, her eyes got bright and she said, wow, that would be, that’d be great. If you don’t mind, that would be really great. And in that moment, 15 people got on their feet and walked around her and I’ll actually put her hands on her and I’m telling you, most of them aren’t even close to being believers. And so we prayed for this woman that was about four and a half years ago.
She’s still alive. She should have been dead three years ago by the way. She’s still alive. She’s doing great. And when I realized was that the wall, the barrier that separates your faith in your business doesn’t actually exist except for in our minds. And so when I started doing was I started, I do three day events and during my three day events, I started having a morning optional morning session called faith and the business of prosperity. And in this session what I would do is I’d bring business owners in and I would teach them a very short little exercise that during this exercise they would learn how to ask God questions about their business and get answers. And over about a three year period of time of doing these little our morning sessions, I tracked about a 99% success rate for people coming in and listening to God.
Now, there were a Buddhist that came in, there were Hindou folks, there were New Agers, there were a lot, plenty of atheists. There are some Christian people that came in. There were some folks who just didn’t have a faith at all. And I would have these people come up to me. Like I had an atheist walk up to me with about five pages of notes and she looked at me and she said, I don’t understand this. You see, I’m an atheist and I have five pages of notes from God here that I got from this session. Can you explain this to me? And I’m like, you explain it to me. Like you’re the one that’s the atheist, you know? And so that woman, by the way, every week, one hour a week, she spends an hour listening to God. You know, after that exercise, it’s amazing.
And so what I did is I took that hour session and I actually stopped separating it from the during the event and I turned to the entire event into a business purpose plan and profit event where there’s no spiritual boundary at all. And again, this isn’t just for Christian folks, everybody comes to this event and you’ll see within the first few hours you’ll learn an exercise where you ask God questions about your business and get answers. It’s fundamentally the most powerful exercise I’ve ever used to break through any issue. And so what you typically experience is fairly massive personal breakthrough in one or two areas of your life within the first three hours. And then we do it with what no other personal development does on planet earth, which is we now start talking about how you can start making money with your business in your plan.
Because a lot of times what happens in personal development or even spiritual events is you show up, you get some kind of breakthrough, you get unstuck, but then you have no plan to make money or to grow your business or to hire people or get new leads or customers because you have no plan to do that. You get stuck again. And so what we do in the businesses, we transition, we go from, from fifth gear to seventh gear and then I start teaching some new and unique ways on how to get new leads, how to get customers, how to get new clients, how to talk to your clients, how to retain clients, how to get reviews, and how to get referrals, how to get people to become repeat customers, how to better monetize your list and your leads and email and Facebook and Twitter and social media and Instagram and all the things that come together in a business event.
But in this context of this area where you’ve just got totally dialed in by God on your purpose.
Ray: Okay, so my curiosity is like peaks through the ceiling here, right? So if I’m listening to this conversation and let’s say I’m a business owner, I’m an entrepreneur, maybe I’m a general manager, responsible for a division or a part of running the business, give me a clue, Ed, what would be a question that would be really powerful that I should consider in this process of questions that I should be asking God about my business?
Ed: Yeah. There’s four categories that I teach in the event, and we won’t have time obviously in this to go through each of the frameworks, but basically there’s four places to start. The first one is on God himself. The second one is on you. The third one is on money, which is really important. The fourth one is on purpose. And so the first thing that you need to do, I find as a business owner is you need to get clear on understanding who exactly God is. That’s very important. No matter who you are, no matter how long you’ve been reading the Bible, no matter how long you’ve been going to church, fundamentally understanding who God is will blow your mind, especially when you realize that he’s not as demanding as you thought he actually was, which was my biggest personal revelation when it came to God. The second thing is understanding who you are. This is actually, I mean like I don’t know the numbers. I’ll bet you 90.5% of the people on planet earth have literally no idea who they are, who God created them to be. And what I understand from working with thousands of business owners and over 400 that have paid me to come into a room like we’re in right now, to get one-on-one coaching, what I understand is that most people have no idea what God placed them on planet earth to do.
And when you find out what that is, you might be blown away at how big it is. I believe God’s eyes are searching right now for men and women who are willing to step up and go here I am. I don’t know what it is, but send me and you’ll be amazed at how your gift set, and how your entire upbringing has been leading you to the place of where God is sending you. And I can tell you that it’s probably fairly big.
The third one is money. Most believers have a completely fundamentally screwed up view of money that’s been taught to us from the very beginning. There’s a verse in Proverbs, I think it’s Proverbs 27 that say, the sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous. What that means is when godly, good and godly people are doing what good and godly people should be doing, there should be a natural transfer of wealth from unrighteous people to righteous people. The reason that the church is poor and we don’t have the resources we need is because we’re not doing what God wants us to do. And part of it is because we don’t understand what to do with our money.
And the fourth one is purpose. And I started talking about this a little bit, but when you line up your understanding of God, your understanding of yourself, your understanding of money and your understanding of purpose, you become like one of Avengers. Unbeatable superheroes in the world. We interviewed a fellow recently and he said, when we began to understand these things that you’re talking about, it really truly gives us an unfair competitive advantage against everybody. That’s ridiculous, right? And you know, it works on both sides too. It helps you avoid distraction. It helps you avoid deals that you shouldn’t take. It also helps you avoid all the criticism that comes with being an entrepreneur and a business owner.
Look, life is hard. You’ve got employees that don’t like you. You’ve got people online who criticize you. You got Yelp pages, and let me tell you, when you know where God’s leading you and you’re heading in that direction, there’s not a critical review. There’s not a nasty word. There’s not a family member who could take you off your game. Most people I find, and I talk about this actually on page two of my book, most people on planet earth and Christians are the worst at this, live their entire lives to meet someone else’s expectations of what they should be doing. And when you live your life that way, you live confused and discouraged and frustrated. You’re not making as much money as you want to. Your family is not as connected as you want to, but man, when you understand where God is leading you, there’s nothing. I don’t care who, how nasty your mother-in-law is. There is nothing that will take you off that mission. There was nothing, because when God focuses you on, something becomes so big. You know, God says to Moses, look, leave here and go into this promise land. That was Moses’s mission. Joshua, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to walk across this river and you’re just going to go ahead and conquer it. Just like that. All right, well be bold and courageous is what God said. When God tells you to go, there’s nothing that will get in your way as long as you know what that’s supposed to be.
Ray: Obviously these are life giving. These are powerful principles. These aren’t, this isn’t rhetoric. These are promises, right? So if I’m listening to this conversation right now and I’m discouraged and I’m listening to go, man, they had, this sounds great, but Oh, I’m just discouraged right now. I’m frustrated. I don’t know the next step. Would you just offer a word of encouragement to that? Frustrated, discouraged the leader right now who doesn’t know the next step?
Ed: Yeah, so a friend of mine, his name is Joe Madden, he’s the manager of the Cubs baseball team. He won the world series two years ago and Joe with his team has a rule that when they lose, he tells his players you’re allowed to lose hard for 30 minutes. And when they win, he says, you can win hard for 30 minutes. But he gives them 30 minutes after each game to reflect upon each game before they move on into the next game or the next series or whatever it is. And as a believer, I think that rules about a minute. So you have permission to be discouraged for about a minute before moving on. By the way, if you’re discouraged or if you’re frustrated, you know, welcome home, you’re in good company. There’s this guy named David who was this amazing King in Israel. And if you read his Psalms like in one day, he’s like, God, you’re amazing. Everything’s working out perfectly. On the next day he’s like, Whoa, bipolar time. You know? And so David and one of the Psalms two actually, well more than this, but you hear the Psalmist who says, why are you downcast my soul? He actually speaks to his soul. And why are you so discouraged? Hope in God, for I will yet praise him for he is the help of my countenance and my soul. So step one, talk to your own self and be like, look, why are you discouraged? There’s no money problem. There’s no business problem. I know it sounds like I’m just giving you past platitudes, but there’s no, there’s nothing. There’s no look, I’ll take you back. God led me to read one of my journals from about seven years ago, opened this journal up and I was reading four, five, six pages of me being frustrated about a situation in business.
It was a client situation. I can’t even remember what it was. And I remember as I was reading through this journal entry, I couldn’t remember the person. I couldn’t remember the situation. It had been so long ago that it all just disappeared. And I thought, man, I spent three days of frustrated journal entries talking about a situation I don’t even remember, you know? So it gave me some perspective today on the things that are, that are happening and what’s good in business. Money goes up and down. Okay. You can always find money. Employees come and go, team members come in and go, customers come and go. There’s a cyclical nature of our business. It’s just the way that life is. There’s a cyclical nature of everything. Look, if you grow cotton, there’s the cyclical nature of cotton growing. And if you grow, you know, widgets that you sell on Amazon, there’s a cyclical nature of that too.
It’s harder to see, but that’s just life. Okay. Now the important thing, like I said, the first one is just talk to yourself and you’re the most important person in this. Get back on mission. God has a plan for you and a purpose. You need to know what that is and focus on that and he’s not going to betray you. You may end up like Joseph, you know, stuck working for somebody that you don’t want to work for for a little while, but God’s going to get you there. Don’t worry about that. And just focus on the fundamentals, the business fundamentals, new leads, new customers, new deals, new money, and old money from old customers. It’s just start with the basics.
Ray: Okay, fantastic. So I’m looking at your book 21 Day Miracle and this is your newest book. I’d love for you to just give us a quick nugget or two of a great takeaway that I would get if I were to read the entire book. What am I going to get out of this?
Ed: Yeah, good. Thanks for that. So the book’s a business book, it’s a performance book. It’s about how to get things done fast. And I’ll give you a word that you probably already know cause you probably go to church like me. You know in the Greek language there’s actually two words for time. We use the word in both ways, but in Greek they split the word up. In one sense there’s what’s called Kronos time, which is chronological time. You look at the clock, it’s noon, they look at the clock. It’s one that’s chronological time. Nothing you can do to speed or slow that up. On the other side there’s Kirosa time, which is the Greek word for it’s time. Time. So for example, my wife just gave birth to our fourth child and she gave birth right on time.
It was a week late according to the due date. But it was right on time. It was exactly when God wanted her to be born. She was born in its time. And so in the book of Romans, you see Paul says in the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, the just for the unjust. And so there is a sense of on time, time. Now there’s an interesting thing about this word and I’m going to bring it into the book, in a second, but that on time for you can actually be delayed and it actually can be sped up.
Let me give you an example. I talked about Moses. Moses left Egypt on the way to the promised land. God said, I want you to go into the promised land, a land flowing and mogul honey send some spies. They send some spies and they came back. God’s plan for them if Moses and Israel had done it properly is they would have marched through the desert for maybe a few months, gone through some kingdoms and gone into the promised land and everything would have been set up about a year later. That was, that was the plan. Well, the plan got thwarted fairly significantly. They ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years because Kairos time on time, time was delayed because of their own disobedience and so you can see how it can be delayed. But actually, interestingly enough, it can also be sped up too. Look, I already told you, God is looking for people who can accomplish this mission and the mission, at least the one I’m talking about in the nation is urgent. That means God’s looking for people who are ready to move now. So how do you speed that up? Well, you start to speed up the way that you do things.
We take far too long as entrepreneurs to do almost anything. Most people live their life completely distracted. The book 21 Day Miracle is designed to show you how to create an an incredibly outrageous goal and then create a short sprint to get you there. And I don’t care if it’s money or business or new customers or your mindset or your body or your health or your marriage or your relationship or your kids or whatever is most important to you right now. The book will show you how to create a short burst, a short sprint of 21 days to create a massive result and a massive change. And I’ve used this for everything. I used it for food. I used it for health. I used it for fitness. I’ve used it business, I’ve used it for golf. I went from shooting in 110 when I first started playing golf last year down in the low nineties.
Now I’m in the 80s finally, finally. So I’ve used this technique, the 21 day miracle for almost anything and you can use it to just to get a fast burst and get on with whatever your goal is so that you can speed up whatever God has for you.
Ray: I love it. I love, it’s called the 21 Day Miracle. It’s by ed rush. You can check it out where?
Ed: www.edrushbook.com and by the way, I make the book price as low as I can on Amazon. Books are not a revenue producer for me. There I’d share a message and a mission. And when you get there, by the way, what I did was I created a whole separate site for your listeners. They get completely for free. It’s got a bunch of downloads and some videos and resources and worksheets. There’s no charge at all. All you got to do is put your email so we know what login you want.
And that’s totally for free for your folks.
Ray: Fantastic. And anyone who ever listens to our program knows there was one question I never failed to ask and have now having done over a hundred of these interviews, I forgot at one time and I promised never to do that again. But it’s what I call my 4:23 question. It’s always the last question I asked in our conversations. It’s based out of Proverbs 4:23 where Solomon writes this, he says, above all else, guard your heart for from it flows all of life. So Ed, what I’d like you to do is I’d like you to imagine the opportunity to gather your family, your friends, your loved ones, those who are most precious to you, and you’re going to pass along that single most important piece of advice to them. Would you fill in the blank for us today? Above all else, besides above all else guard your heart.
Ed: It’s interesting that verse. So I think it was Luke 10, Jesus pulls his disciples together and Luke says he told them this parable so that they would pray and not lose heart. And the interesting thing about the Christian journey is Jesus knew this because he was teaching his disciples this. It’s really easy to pray and lose heart. I already talked about a mission and a vision and God’s wanting to change the country. Well look if you join that or if you go on your mission, whatever your mission is, the first thing that’s probably going to happen. I’ll take you back to this story. It’ll be 15 to 20 seconds. Abraham in Genesis 12 was called by God to leave his nation and to bring his family into a new nation. God said, look, I’m going to make you an amazing nation.
Stars and sand and your children are going to populate the world and Abraham leaves are and moves into Canaan. And the next verse says, now there was a really big famine in the land. So Abraham had to go to Egypt. And I imagine his family was looking at him at that point. Like, Oh, you heard from God. Oh right. You know, and so it’s really common when you first start out on almost anything that a lot of times God gives you almost the complete opposite of what he said he was going to give you at first, and so when Jesus taught his folks to do that, so above all else, the first one, guard your heart is actually one of the most important things because your goal is a long mission. It’s a long purpose of yours and it’s going to take some ups and downs, ups and downs to get there.
The second thing, I’ll take it back to the very beginning of the interview where I talked about those small incremental changes that happen simply over time. That’s the reason why a 21 day miracle in the book that we just mentioned is so important because you’ve got it. You have a big plan, but you need short bursts to get you there. The fact is we live on planet earth where things work a certain way, so it could be business, it could be getting new customers, it could be gaining new clients. It could be launching or creating a new business. It can be starting a nonprofit or a ministry, whatever is on your heart, but take the first step which is guard your heart and pray and not lose heart. Persist, in other words. And the second is create a plan, a short burst plan to get you just one step along the way. Those two things, you’ll be fine.
Ray: That’s fantastic and thank you for joining us.
Ed: Yes sir. Thank you.
Ray: I’m the program here at Bottom Line Faith folks, check it out. Again, EdRushBook.com. Great, great leader, great principals here. A man who loves Jesus is modeling Christ in the marketplace. That’s what we’re all about here at Bottom Line Faith. Till next time, I am your host Ray Hilbert at Bottom Line Faith encouraging you to live out your faith every day in the market. God bless and we’ll see you next time.